


Would it be a Sin?

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Loss, M/M, ambiguous supernatural element, arguable rape
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-16 22:53:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11262693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: This is a tale of little boys listening to the guttural and silent cries of grief. This is a tale of Elvis Presley, novelty mugs, car heaters which don’t work. Ad infinitum. A tale of liminality, a tale of ambiguity. A tale of growing up and of growing younger and of shouldering something bigger than we are built to bear.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Title shameless stolen from Elvis. Please go easy on me - I haven't written anything for nearly two years.

This is a tale.

This is a tale of little boys listening to the guttural and silent cries of grief. This is a tale of Elvis Presley, novelty mugs, car heaters which don’t work. Ad infinitum. A tale of liminality, a tale of ambiguity. A tale of growing up and of growing younger and of shouldering something bigger than we are built to bear.

I’m sorry. I should introduce myself. I am omniscient in this piece of work. An overseer, someone who now – at the end of the rope – has seeing eyes which communicate with a telling mouth. A keyboard, I should say. It would be unfair to compartmentalise this into a medium for which it is not fit. There are parts of myself to be discovered and recorded; the story would have gaps in if I didn’t plug them up with bits of me. But for now. I am omniscient.

  
It’s unfair, this job I’ve been tasked with. Of recording. Firstly, it makes me a filter. An unfair filter. And even I, with all my remembered eyes, am partial to these events. You’ll get everything through me. You’re looking at me now, from your seat at the other side of the room. How strangely thrilling it is to think that I’m thinking of you and writing of you at this very moment and you aren’t aware of it. You’re still looking – stop it.

  
And secondly, it’s unfair on me. To dredge this, like silt, collected in a plastic net where no fish will ever find their way. Dredging a up a story – so real – and watch it fictionalise like mud. Every name has been changed or removed. For anonymity, mind. For anonymity and for my fingers, to save them from bashing out a name and a name and a name. Let me never hear it; no voice, no tongue is worthy of it. Not even mine. And all the while my wellies are filling with river water and the sun dips, dips, falls behind the mask of cloud cover.

  
At the time, for these two – for these three – characters you’re yet to meet, it was open. Awash with winter sunshine (and later, summer sunshine), cold breath caught at the back of their throats, trapped, imprisoned with excitement. With newness. Eyes which would fly open every morning, one set at 6.15am at the call of an alarm, the other set intermittently, throughout the night, interrupted by imagined hypotheses and a somersault of thinking. Exhilaration and the prospect of the coming day eliciting snapping eyelids and sudden movements. One set of movements up, across, to the left, to a dressing gown, then more to the left, to the shower (too cold), eyes still open. One set of movements up, across to the right, to a mobile phone, more to the right, to a kettle, and then sporadically to unfiled sheets or exercise books, and even occasionally to the outside air.

  
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I know all this because it has already happened. In my chronology, all I can think of are swans. Swans, although built like vessels, are not seaworthy. I think of swans, gliding, trapped on the ocean, drowning in a loss of direction, starving for freshwater fish. Poor cygnets, their grey feathers dressed all in white. Poor cygnets, not a drop to drink, alone on a wide, wide sea.

  
“You’ve been at this for half an hour,” You say, crossing the room. “Tapping feverishly like a- a-,”

  
“Nothing taps like I do.” I smile. I don’t mention how most of the fevered tapping has been on my abused backspace key. Clumsy digits.

  
“You haven’t done anything!”

  
I’m reminded how it’s apparently rude to write down what someone says in front of you verbatim when they’re still in front of you and are supposed to be writing a chronological narrative about events very much with nothing to do with anything inside this room. I’m then reminded how just because I haven’t written in direct speech it’s still rude.

  
I agree, though. I should get on with it. Perhaps I’d like to call it artistic license. Perhaps it’s more credibly something called ‘stalling’. Me, with all my god-like omniscience, am terrified to face these eyes. Eyes which have seen beyond the springy September getups. Eyes which have witnessed cracks in the caverns of men’s chests like porcelain. And eyes, too, which are much older than their years.


	2. Two

Establishing character is dull. Mundane. You already know the fundamentals so I’ll be brief – brief enough that I won’t get told off for stalling. Again.

  
A teacher. A primary school teacher, envisage him. Tired around the eyes and hands which sometimes shake when writing on the board in ‘DRYERASABLEMARKER’ but feet which are always stable foundations, shoulder width apart, proud, pride, they are proud feet. Is that enough? Does that establish our protagonist?

 

I’ll move on. He’s not so relevant.

  
“But what about the descriptions?” You’re grinning at me. Cheshire cat. You know. “I need to know what he looks like so I can picture him properly. You know. In the tale.”

  
I don’t have the energy for this today and I think it’s getting conveyed in my typing. Angry typing which keeps going just slightly wrong. I’d rather be somewhere with windows, somewhere with the sea, perhaps. Stood somewhere close. Veins feed into the heart, so stood on a river, then. Flowing, nudging its body towards its mother. My feet, bare. Immersed in the current, I have become an intravenous invader. I conjure it. Closing my eyes here, in this present chronology, opening them elsewhere. It’s beautiful, the sun rippling across the surface which some would deem a millpond, a surface which I would deem turbulent. Minute currents and flip-flop splashes which capture something of the light which photographs – or memories – can’t. It’s only in these presents – not my present because I am elsewhere in the my-present which is the here-present – that we can see the seeable in ways like we can feel pain. It’s not very complicated. The light is sharp and startling and I look and look and look beyond and see the flat. Where the tiny motions erase themselves with distance and become one singular, perfect line.

  
Sand, grit, enmeshed between my toes as prisoners which have never tasted the salt. Freshwater feet, buried in veins, not understanding the point of arteries. Why would anything want to leave that? Leave her? The sea – she - - I give her pronouns like the women who traverse her. This is a female landscape. I look up and look back and I’ve lost sight of the line and I’ve lost sight of the beach and my feet are sinking into the silt. I look around and realise for the first time that I am alone. Windowless.

  
But this teacher, with his proud feet. We must do him justice. He’s got a ramrod back and jumpers which someone told him once mask his surprisingly impressive musculature. He’s got sandy hair thanks to genetics and it’s flecked with silvery ashes thanks to exposure to Time. Before this Time was so desperately cruel the genetics always seemed to win out and he was awarded the epithet of ‘Sandy’. And then, later, markedly as a product of rapacious Time, he was outwardly cheerful, amenable. One unremarkable morning in the cramped staffroom during the morning briefing he was sitting upon a chair with a worn seat which smelled like stale instant coffee which overpowered the small of fresh play-dough and buttered cheap toast from the corridor and he was being outwardly cheerful (thank you, Time). And somebody said - a colleague, irrelevant to this chronology –

  
“You’re so cheerful, god, I don’t know how you manage it at eight every morning.” This colleague picked up their tea, winced, put down their tea (in a clear demonstration of their inability to exude cheerfulness at eight in the morning) and continued, “Cheerful Sandy. More cheery than a box of Cheerios. God help me.”

  
Much to the primary school teacher’s horror, the title ‘Sandy-O’ could be described as doing nothing other than sticking. Sticking, mockingly, sticking, in irony, sticking, in name, status, sticking to the soles of his shoes like something sticky and wholly unpleasant to have stuck to the sole of ones shoes and then, after all this, one day – stuck. Sandy-O. Hideous.

  
The funny thing is, the name is hardly relevant at all, though it’s what I’ll use here. Distance. Anonymity. They always say you should never give farm animals names because then you struggle to sit down at the dinner table to a succulent and gravy-soaked slab of poor Johnny-the-lamb. Perhaps we should call the protagonist ‘Lamb #1’.

  
But the name, the nickname – presumably used in fondness yet always carrying with it a sickly green veneer – as I say, was hardly relevant. The hair had matured and slinked into nothing like a shade of sand. Wet sand, perhaps. Sand under encroaching cloud cover, expecting a tempest of the most violent. So he was grey, first and foremost. Second and secondmost, the cheerfulness so comparable to a Kellogg’s breakfast cereal was more fraudulent than the company’s emphasis on healthy eating. It made him think of the milk, sitting, downing, coagulating in the heat. Once cold, strangulating your breakfast, untouched, abandoned in favour of a self-hatred induced lack of appetite. Smelling off-sweet and off-white and off. Off, off. Curdled. Nose-wrinkling. Powers of contortion.

  
Every morning, at precisely 6.15am (this is before the later rises, before the September) the alarm set to the loudest and most piercing volume on his phone would drag him out of dreams. Are they fairly called dreams? His narratives, at least. Tales, much like this is a tale. Often incoherent, often featuring sand of a very different kind to his hair, of heat and of red and of grit. Earthy grit. Gritted teeth. Grit and determination. And ultimate futility looking proud feet in the eyes, which ignored this, ignored inevitability, and ploughed through sand. Sand, sometimes snakes, writhing and indiscriminate.

  
And every morning his eyes would be gummed shut, as if with sand, with grit, flying towards his face in subconscious sandstorms, subconscious assaults. Rack-a-rack-a-rack-a-rack-a-rack-a-rick-a-rick-a-rick-a-rick-a-rick-rack-a-rack-a-rack-a-rack-a-rack. Did you know that machine gun crossfire will have a different frequency depending on its pivot in relation to where you’re standing? Did you know that insurgents in Afghanistan killed over two thousand three hundred civilians, including nine hundred and thirty in suicide bombings, and that military forces killed over one thousand six hundred and twenty civilians alone? Rack-a-rack-a-

  
Every morning ‘Sandy-O’ would pour a bowl of cereal and pour the milk and look at it and look at it and then leave the room and have a shower and wipe the condensation from the mirror and look and smile and smile until the condensation stubbornly formed again and then he would leave and dress and put on his coat and avoid all of the other mirrors and avoid the kitchen where a bowl of milk slowly was beginning to curdle and leave the house and smile and smile.

  
So you can see, I suppose, how the name was never really apt in the first place.


End file.
